China’s Internet Speed Ranks 91st in the World

A woman on her phone in Pingyao, China. About half of the Chinese population is online, and 90 percent gain access to the internet via their phones.Credit
Adam Dean for The New York Times

BEIJING — Anyone who spends any time online in China knows surfing the internet is like wading through quicksand. That is especially true when browsing websites not hosted on a Chinese server.

This week, an online report published in China Daily, a state-run, English-language newspaper, said that China, the world’s second-largest economy, ranked an abysmal 91st in the world in internet speed, with the average broadband connection scored at a mere 9.46 megabits per second, or Mbps. There are nearly 200 countries in the world.

The report ranked the top five countries in internet speed as South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Japan and the Netherlands. The average broadband speed in South Korea was reported as 26.7 Mbps. In Sweden, it was 19.1 Mbps.

The data was part of a broader report that was aimed at boasting of China’s internet connectivity, under the title “Evolution of the Internet in China.” The report listed as its sources the China Internet Network Information Center, an agency under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology; the website of People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper; the Broadband Development Alliance, a research group; and Akamai Technologies, a content delivery network and cloud services provider based in Cambridge, Mass.

The report promoted the fact that China now has 688 million people online, about half the population; that it added 40 million new internet users in 2015; and that 90 percent of users can get online via their mobile phones.

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Many foreign websites — including The New York Times, Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — are blocked by the Great Firewall, the system of internet censorship in China. People who want to visit those sites must use software that provides a virtual private network, or VPN, which allows the user to go through a foreign server to get to the websites. That slows down internet use even more. VPNs are also less reliable than ever in China, constantly dropping out.

In April, the man credited with developing the Great Firewall, Fang Binxing, had to use a VPN to try to enter South Korean websites during a presentation he was giving at his alma mater, the Harbin Institute of Technology. The VPN kept dropping out, forcing him to ad-lib some of his presentation.

Many people in China do not watch videos hosted on non-Chinese servers because the videos download or stream too slowly.

During politically sensitive periods, internet speed becomes molasseslike, especially in Beijing. This happens every spring around the time of the annual legislative conclave here.

During mass protests and violence, China can shut down access to the wider internet in entire regions, forcing users to rely on a very limited intranet. This was enacted for one year in Xinjiang, in the west, after ethnic violence erupted there in 2009.

There is also extremely limited internet access in some Chinese-ruled Tibetan areas where Tibetans have self-immolated to protest government policies.

Last October, a report on internet freedom by Freedom House, a prominent American pro-democracy group, ranked China last among 65 nations, behind Iran, Cuba and Myanmar. (North Korea was not part of the report.) China has been steadily falling in the rankings in the annual report. In 2014, it ranked third to last, ahead of Iran and Syria.